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Deeplinks Blog

Deeplinks Blog

A while back, we wrote an open letter to SunnComm, the manufacturer responsible for the insecure MediaMax DRM software installed on audio CDs. As an initial formal response, SunnComm has released lists of all the titles, regardless of label, that use the MediaMax 5 and ...

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other search engines have massive databases that reach into the most intimate details of your life-- what you search for, what you read, what worries you, what you enjoy. It is critical to protect the privacy of this information so that people can feel free...

On Wednesday, a New Mexico state court judge denied a summary judgment motion made by Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and permitted the plaintiffs in an important e-voting challenge to move forward with discovery. The suit, filed in January of 2005, challenges the state's use of paperless e-voting systems in...

In the previous post, we noted the approaching deadline for filing reply comments in the Copyright Office's DMCA rulemaking proceeding and summarized the proposed exemption submitted by Ed Felten and J. Alex Halderman. This post highlights another key first round comment, one submitted by the ...

The U.S. Copyright Office received 74 comments proposing exemptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision as part of its triennial DMCA rulemaking proceeding. In this and subsequent posts, we will summarize the key exemption proposals made in this first round of comments. If you can offer specific factual or...

But Broader Privacy Concerns Remain San Francisco - Yesterday, the Justice Department asked a federal court in San Jose, California to force Google to turn over search records for use as evidence in a case where the government is defending the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Google...

Last week, we told you about a troublesome "phone home" feature in iTunes MiniStore -- one of the new "improvements" in iTunes announced at MacWorld. The MiniStore looks at what you listen to and suggests additional songs and artists you might like, but they were some big problems with...

Canadian politics have been exciting of late -- a scandal, a collapsed government, and now another scandal involving a member of that collapsed government. But the really interesting bit is that the last scandal revolves around a Canadian MP's close ties...

This week at MacWorld, Apple unveiled version 6.0.2 of iTunes, which it simply claimed "includes stability and performance improvements over iTunes 6.0.1." Among these so-called improvements is the Apple iTunes MiniStore -- a localized "recommendation" engine that would look at what you listen to and then suggest additional songs and...

While a nearly infinite quantity of web ink has been spilled on the copyright issues raised by Google's Library Project (formerly Google Print), there have been few good resources that concisely summarize the positions of both sides. Jonathan Band, copyright lawyer and author of one of the best...

There's a new trend underway among indie labels, dubbed "digital vinyl": offering free MP3 downloads for customers who buy albums on vinyl. First Merge Records offered free downloads to those who bought vinyl releases by Clientele and Robert Pollard. Now Saddle Creek Records has announced that...

January 2006
by Fred von Lohmann Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Electronic Frontier Foundation fred@eff.org
v. 5.0, January 2006 I. What this is, and who should read it. The future of peer-to-peer file-sharing is entwined, for better or worse, with copyright law. Copyright owners have already targeted not only...

On December 22, the DOJ published a letter attempting to provide a legal justification of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States. While the wiretaps would violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on its face, the government argues that that the Authorization...